5.26.2013

7.5 oz soda cans are the only way to drink soda. Soda, being a mostly useless beverage, is not usually appealing to me, especially in its 12oz form. I never finish the whole can, and I always feel gross afterwards. But shrink the portion size? Genius. And as annoying as it is, it makes sense that they charge more for the small guy than its heavyweight 12oz counterpart. After all, they make far fewer of the 7.5 oz ones. But we can change that America! Increased demand for 7.5 oz will change the supply and make it cheaper. Join the 7.5oz movement!

Apparently Billy Joel never actually got a DUI? You learn something new every day.

Betty Duffy is great. I wish she would move her writing back to her blog-of-record, but she's probably making a least a little bit of money now. Writing on the internet doesn't get much better than her page, so check it out.

5.04.2013

I just finished watching the Fox News special ("See No Evil") on
abortionist Kermit Gosnell, who is on trial in Philadelphia for multiple
murders and other crimes. Gosnell can't understand how it can be that
he is facing prison and possibly even the death penalty for killing the
babies whose necks he snipped after they "precipitated" (i.e., emerged
from the womb.) The women who came into his clinic came in to have the
babies they were carrying killed. That was the point of the exercise.
"Terminating" the babies' lives was the service he offered and
performed. Had he killed the babies while they were still in their
mothers' bodies (by, for example, inserting a needle to inject a poison
into their tiny hearts) that would not have been a crime. He merely
would have been assisting his patients in exercising what the Supreme
Court deems a constitutional right. So why, he would like to know, is he
being prosecuted for killing the same babies moments later after they
precipitated? I must admit that I am no less puzzled by that question
than Gosnell is. How can it be that killing a baby inside the womb is
perfectly acceptable while killing the very same baby (or even a baby
that is a few days or even weeks younger) outside the womb is first
degree murder? Of course, in my view we should not permit the killing of
babies inside or outside the womb. A baby's status as a precious member
of the human family, possessing profound, inherent, and equal dignity,
does not depend on something as morally arbitrary as his or her
location. But if we permit the Gosnells of the world to kill babies
inside the womb, it seems odd to charge them with murder for killing
them outside the womb. This is especially true in view of the fact that
inducing delivery and then killing babies marked for "termination"
eliminates the risk to women involved in the common abortion practice of
dismembering babies inside the womb and removing their severed body
parts.

Pretentious Precepts

"First Things means, first, that the first thing to be said about public life is that public life is not the first thing. First Things means, second, that there are first things, in the sense of first principles, for the right ordering of public life."

“A free society cannot survive if we are so free that nothing is expected of us.”